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Generative art over the years

blog.veitheller.de

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Re: Generative art over the years

#21

Post by OZYMANDIASAK »

ww520 wrote: post #4

Years ago. I dabbled in generative art. I even wrote a small Forth-like language to control the generation. It's basically controllable chaos with math or chaos within bounding patterns. The results were often unexpected. Some examples: https://imgur.com/a/UjWLy7s

This is beautiful. I'd really love to see some serious discourse about the place that generative art should have in our society and about what art really means in today's age of overconsumption.

I'm not sure art is still meant to be a widely shared experience and smarter people than should tackle this idea.

Re: Generative art over the years

#23

Post by hparadiz »

I used to help run an art website and had to figure out how to do taxonomy for art. Imagine if someone asked you to put all art into categories.

One major truth discovered:

Art is always in the eye of the beholder.

Re: Generative art over the years

#26

Post by andsoitis »

hparadiz wrote: post #23

I used to help run an art website and had to figure out how to do taxonomy for art. Imagine if someone asked you to put all art into categories. One major truth discovered: Art is always in the eye of the beholder.

> Art is always in the eye of the beholder.

I like to think of fine art as a subjective human expression to stir emotion.

Re: Generative art over the years

#27

Post by ww520 »

Lerc wrote: post #10
ww520 wrote: post #4

Years ago. I dabbled in generative art. I even wrote a small Forth-like language to control the generation. It's basically controllable chaos with math or chaos within bounding patterns. The results were often unexpected. Some examples: https://imgur.com/a/UjWLy7s

You may like https://c50.fingswotidun.com/ It's what I doodle with to generate images using a stack based program per pixel. Every character is a stack operation, you have 50 characters to make something special.

That's pretty neat; some of output are beautiful!

Mine is also pixel coloring at the lowest level. I have a shading kernel in GPU doing the low level work, mainly applying colors recursively like fractal. I got sick of writing shader code so I make a high level language supporting math operations in concise expression that are compiled to shader code in GPU. The main thing is it supports functions. That let me reuse code and build up abstractions. E.g once I get the "ring" pattern settled, it's defined as a function and I can use it in other places, combine with other functions, and have it be called by other functions.

One of these days when I get some time, I'll formalize it and publish it.

Re: Generative art over the years

#28

Post by p5v »

Generative art was my first love. By accident, I ended up being a student of the great Frieder Nake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieder_Nake) and that changed my future trajectory.

Eventually, this led me to writing my own indie book on generative art with Go: https://p5v.gumroad.com/l/generative-art-in-golang, which led me to a talk I gave on GopherCon Europe: https://youtu.be/NtBTNllI_LY?si=GMePA3CfVQZJq2O7

These were great times, but I think the book is not worth buying anymore. Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me, and I've been trying to get back to it for the last few years.

Re: Generative art over the years

#29

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

ww520 wrote: post #4

Years ago. I dabbled in generative art. I even wrote a small Forth-like language to control the generation. It's basically controllable chaos with math or chaos within bounding patterns. The results were often unexpected. Some examples: https://imgur.com/a/UjWLy7s

These are sick. Color, contrast, composition, patterns, etc. Really inspiring stuff. Reminds me how digital art used to feel ~20 years ago.

Re: Generative art over the years

#30

Post by ww520 »

OZYMANDIASAK wrote: post #21
ww520 wrote: post #4

Years ago. I dabbled in generative art. I even wrote a small Forth-like language to control the generation. It's basically controllable chaos with math or chaos within bounding patterns. The results were often unexpected. Some examples: https://imgur.com/a/UjWLy7s

This is beautiful. I'd really love to see some serious discourse about the place that generative art should have in our society and about what art really means in today's age of overconsumption. I'm not sure art is still meant to be a widely shared experience and smarter people than should tackle this idea.

Thank you!

I'm glad people are interested in art discourse and exploring arts in general. Art is a very personal thing. Different people see arts in different ways. Yet there's some recurrent themes time after time.

I got my insight in art in musics and on why people love them so much. Musics and songs are basically repeatable patterns with slight variations in multiple dimensions, in pitch, in beat, in tone, in rhyme, in lyrics, etc. The human mind is a super pattern processing machine, as part of our evolution survival traits. Pattern brings structure, abstraction, and comfort. But strict repetitive patterns bore the mind. Human love patterns, but with variation and imperfection.

The human mind is very good in filling the missing pieces in a pattern, again from our evolution survival traits. Our ancestors could look at the tail of an animal and filled in the blank that it's a tiger hidden behind a big rock. The filling of missing pieces is by experience and learning. It really is the original generative AI.

I believe the variation and imperfection in patterns trigger the mind's filling the blank function, which triggers the generative function, which can run wild generating wide range of imagination. That's why arts can have different reaction from different people as each has their own life experience and thus different generated result.

I think art is patterns with variation, imperfection, and blanks at the most basic level. Computer generated art thus needs to fulfill that basic requirement at the least to be called art.

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